Steel
Beasts is a modern warfare tanksim and features two playable tanks, the
US M1A1 Abrams and the German Leopard 2A4. It's the first tanksim
released since 1999 and quite possibly the last for several years. While all tanksims (and sims in
general) come with plus and minuses, Steel Beast has an integrated plus
so strong that it quite literally leaves the others in its dust. Coming from
eSim Studios and Shrapnel Games, Steel Beasts is the
magnum opus of one talented programmer and a small cadre of
knowledgeable military tankers. There's realism built into Steel Beasts
that many previous tanksims never approached. SB is stout with the
stuff. Which raises the
question, does the focus on realism take the edge off of gameplay, or
enhance it? Will Steel Beasts quench the thirst of dedicated
tanksim commanders only to intimidate the casual gamer out of the arena?

The manual is a tidy little, fluff-free 79-page booklet that, in conjunction
with 12 tutorial missions for each tank model and 8 general purpose
lessons, contains all the information needed to master the skills of
tanking in Steel Beasts. Steel Beasts is nowhere nearly as novice friendly
as Armored Fist 2/3 or Spearhead. Listen up: you will need to study
with diligence. With the focus on realistic gameplay, you can't
drive and shoot as you might expect in a more game-oriented sim. To
survive and hit targets in Steel Beasts, there is no substitute for
learning how the ballistics are modeled and knowing operational details such as
manually selecting the correct ammo type in the M1A1 (the German loader
handles this without your help automatically) and judicious use of the Laser Range
Finder (you can shut it down quickly if you overuse it). While hardcore
tanksim jockeys salivate over details that bring the game more in line
with reality, a casual gamer might furrow his brow in confusion when his
shots are off the mark. Read the manual, know the content, and play the
tutorials. To their credit, the dev team added a warning in the Instant
Action mission briefings that the player had better complete the
tutorials before stepping onto the battlefield. The tutorials are
composed of textual briefings and limited missions that allow the player
to hone the specific skill of the tutorial. Unlike Armored Fist 3, the
player gets no instruction during the mission. In addition to the
tutorials, there is a section titled Gunnery Range, which amounts to
target practice. This is the next step for the non-military tanksim
player after the tutorials. Sharpen your skills here.

Once you deem yourself ready for battle, there are three types of
missions; Instant Action, Single Player, and Multi-player. There is no
campaign mode in Steel Beasts, dynamic or scripted. Instant Action
mode feeds you a steady stream of enemy vehicles and ammo. You are
scored on how quickly you acquire and hit your targets, how many targets
you hit, and how many shots/target it takes you. There are 46
Single Player missions with a lot of variety and a Map Editor and
powerful Scenario Editor so the party never ends. Multi-player allows
two players to crew the same tank, a first in PC tanksims.

The two important playing positions, gunner and tank commander, are
featured extensively. Playing as the gunner, you have your primary
sight, auxiliary sight, and unity sight. As the gunner you can switch to thermal imaging to
detect your targets. It works quite well, too. Enemy tanks are brightly
lit and stand out well from the surroundings. Objects at a distance are
obscure and blend in with the terrain, which is a plus, making spotting
and identifying threats a practical challenge. Using the Thermals
assists you in picking out a mottled green/brown camouflaged tank from
the grass, trees, and dirt it's hiding in. If you take damage, you can
switch to emergency mode (no automatic lead is added) or as a last
resort, manual mode. Then you have the fun of banging on the arrows keys
to simulate hand-cranking the massive turret into position. Say, where
did I leave that white flag?

As the tank commander, you can assume control of the main gun and slew
onto targets, designate, and when the gunner shouts
"Identified", pass the job off or fire the round yourself. You
go from buttoned-up to unbuttoned with a flick of the 'B' key. The TC
can view through the gunner's primary sight extension to see exactly
what his gunner is eyeballing. When there is action against lightly
skinned vehicles or unlucky soldiers, the TC can bring the .50 machine
gun into play.

Graphics are the Achilles' heel of Steel Beasts. Unaccelerated,
2D, and pixel-rich, Steel Beasts is a visual throwback to the mid-nineties.
But don't head for the door just yet. The scenes are detailed and very stable, none of the flickering and
clipping seen in Panzer Elite. And as in PE, the battlefieldenvironment is
rich with trees, bushes, bogs, roads, plains, lakes, ridges, and
entire forests. Although the trees are essentially the same bitmap and
have a 2D look, I didn't find this overly objectionable. Good graphics are
essential in a sim but are hardly the make-or-break feature. Witness the
success and excellence of Ensemble's Age of Empires line. AOE shows how
well-rendered 2D objects can actually be preferred to the more complex
3D versions. 2D graphics can co-exist with superb gameplay and attention
to detail. The use of individual trees in the forests gives the player a
forest he can drive into and hide, brushing through with the delightful
rustles of leaves and branches. Enemy tanks and troops will seek refuge behind
ridges and trees, making lasing and targeting a realistic challenge. You
haven't lived until you've gone down a long winding trail in a densely
wooded forest to ambush the enemy on the other side! On
the downside: smoke is not very opaque, dirt clouds are mostly a single
shade of brown, and there are no weather effects or night scenes at all.
With the gameplay, though, you may be too busy fighting for battlefield
dominance to notice.

It's okay to lament the lack of 3D accelerated graphics, it doesn't hold
the sim back much. Bear in mind that Steel Beasts is the work of a small
but dedicated group of tank enthusiasts. They had no choice but to cut
this baby loose. If Steel Beasts does well commercially, there could be
add-ons and enhancements for years. If there is a Steel Beasts II, with
a 2001 era graphics engine, Tanksim.com will have to get a new thesaurus
of superlatives.

Fighting effectively in a tanksim demands an effective interface. Using the joystick/keyboard combo, I found commanding the
tank to be very intuitive and effortless. There is a drop-down menu bar
at the top of the screen that I liked a lot as I learned the functions. As the gunner, I could control
the turret with the stick and drive the tank with the keyboard, or I
could let the AI driver run the show and stick to blasting the enemy.
Fortunately, the feel and control of the main gun is pretty close to
perfect. None of the twitchiness found in the Armored
Fist series--the Steel Beasts gun control will respond to small and large
inputs from the stick very progressively, making acquiring, aiming,
tracking, and hitting very satisfying. Along the bottom of the screen is
a nice little tank profile that shows you where the hull, gun, and LOS
are headed. Small and crisp, it doesn't get in the way but does the job.
There are unit icons for your other vehicles.

Throughout sim, sounds of battle are impressively reproduced. The crews
are military sounding (their voices were recorded from
military personnel), the explosions and concussions robust, the
rumble of the tank and whine of the turbine faithfully executed. The
turret sounds are on the same order as Spearhead, loud and dominant! Press
the LRF and you hear a muffled -whoompf!--. Fire the .50 cal and you
can hear the spent cartridges rattling on the deck. During battle, radio
chatter adds to the ambiance and assist you in cutting through the fog
of war. Sounds from other vehicles penetrate into
your tank, emphasizing you're part of a group. Run out of main gun
rounds and your can even hear the loader banging around, rummaging the
interior for that last shell. Put on headphones and crank up the
sound--Steel Beasts is one of the better auditory feasts around.

Another area where Steel Beasts shines is the lifelike interplay between
the gunner and the tank commander. Say your are running the main gun,
searching through your primary sight for movement, and the tank
commander observes a threat. He will slew the turret rapidly toward the
new target and call it out. You can aim and fire at this target or
reassume searching in the original direction. It feels like your playing
with another person. I almost shouted, "Good job!" a few times
to the T/C. I have to mention that the TC is very willful and even if
you (as the gunner) are lining up a shot on a target, the TC will slew
you around to his threat. I got in a tug-of-war with the 120mm several
times until I learned to let him call the shots (lame pun alert!
--ed.) Another feature that
immediately becomes apparent is the AI of your tank driver. If you stick to the gunner's station, your driver will take up
position behind a ridge, giving you hull-down position from which to
fire. After a few shots, the AI driver will reverse the tank and break
contact, shift to the left or right and pull up to the ridge to
reengage. This neat routine is just one example of the intended realism
eSim has injected into their work.

There are so many small details and touches in this sim that I had
trouble keeping track of them. There is time compression, vehicle
formations and facing, an extensive map and tactical view, customizable
routing, and lots of opportunities to break things and hurt people. Gravity
and physics are modeled very well. Running though a bog slows you
noticeably; navigating a forest is stop and go as some trees fall flat
immediately and others have to be toppled with effort, or bypassed.
Steel Beasts operates on a large, expansive battlefield. There can be
several battles raging at once in different places and they don't wait
on you to join, the fight goes on. Viewed from the tactical map, you get
reports on enemy units and they show up with varying degrees of
accuracy, depending on the unit reporting. No cheats here, no magic eye
from above. If you or your troops see the enemy, they will appear on the
map, just as if you marked them down by hand.

And the enemy sees you, too. AI ranges from poor to outstanding, which I
suppose mirrors the skills of different units. Some tanks were sitting
ducks while others battered me mercilessly. At one point, I had a
platoon of infantry tied down. My tank was taking small arms fire--a lot
of pinging and sparks but no damage to me--and I decided to expose my
tank commander by hitting the "unbutton" key, thinking I would
forgo the coax and return fire in sportsman-like fashion with the .50
cal. Almost at once, as the hatch opened and I stuck my head up I heard
a few wet thuds and "Ugh!", no more tank commander! Now that's
good AI!

Targeting and hitting the enemy is manageable but takes operational
discipline. You must know the procedures and the equipment. Using the
laser rangefinder helps you determine target range. If you are lasing an
open-wheeled vehicle or a tank at long range, you have the option to
select First Return or Last Return, letting you judge what may be a
false return and keep a valid one. If you try to use the LRF arcade
fashion (numerous times in an unnaturally short span-read: clickfest
mode) you will damage the sensitive instrument and disable it (on the
M1A1; the Leo simply cuts it off until it cools down. Them Germans are
mighty smart!). You will
want to release the palm switches and erase the automatic lead in the
ballistics computer ("dumping the lead") before engaging a new
target. And as the M1A1 gunner, it is crucial that you pay attention to
the type of ammo being loaded and set the ballistics computer
accordingly. The more smoothly you track the target, the more likely you
can get a kill. Follow the procedures and you can be very effective. There's
a certain level of gratification for mastering the gunnery in Steel
Beasts that the simplified tanksims don't offer.

You are allowed to float from unit to unit but you are restricted to the chase
view on anything other than the M1A1
or Leopard tanks. Artillery and
infantry units are incorporated in the sim. The arty allows you to
drop smoke, high explosive, instant minefield (FASCAM), or anti-tank
munitions (ICM) with the proper delay in execution of several minutes.
When the shells come raining down, you will know it. Steel Beasts'
artillery effects are great, mountains of smoke and dirt flying, lots of
that booming stuff. The
individual soldiers will run and kneel, drop for cover and crumble when
hit. They can be carrying anti-tank weapons which add to your headaches.
APCs will truck along and deposit a platoon of men. When the APC is
ready to move out, the troops scurry back into the vehicle, much like
M1TP2. What you don't get is any kind of air support or threat. No
Hinds, Su-25s, or MIGs; no Longbows, A-10s, or Harriers. This deficiency
knocks the historical accuracy down a notch. In a real battle, you would
expect and get plenty of fire in the sky. Although the Steel Beasts
design scheme or development budget may have prohibited helos and ground
attack aircraft, you can't shrug this off as easily as the limited
graphics. Threats from the sky are as much a part of the tank
battlefield as adversarial AFVs.

You'll be happy to learn that vehicle damage is depicted with a generous
degree of variety. Sometimes
you'll get a direct hit on a target and separate the turret from the hull in
dramatic fashion. Other times you may damage a target's track and he'll
be immobilized. Frequently your victim will burst into flame but you
don't always get any sign the tank you are dueling with is dead, which
is the way it should be. Ballistics are modeled
with great fidelity. The sabot round has a markedly different
trajectory than the HEAT and you better learn the difference. When your
tank takes a non-fatal hit, you get kicked back from the gunsight to the tank
interior, so if you were carefully lining up a shot, you will need to
start over. While the M1A1 can take several licks and strike back, hits to your tank usually result in some damage.
One hit from a T-80 may not kill you, but lots of neat stuff on your tank
gets broken, like the laser range finder, ballistics computer,
stabilizer, all of which makes
your job even tougher. Once I heard the turbine winding down--loss of
engine! At this point it's okay to cry "Mommy!"--because
you're about
to die!

You're correct if you've reached this point and concluded that Steel
Beasts has a lot going for it. There's another side to the SB saga that
most in-the-know tanksim players are well aware of. eSim and Shrapnel
Games have conducted the most effective and thorough public relations
campaign in sim history. For, Steel Beasts was originally targeted to premiere
around the summer of 1997. Development and improvements continued for
three additional years with a fanatical mind-set to capturing the essence
of a real tank sim. As the years wore on, the debut of what was
widely anticipated as the most realistic and comprehensive modern
tanksim ever became almost a sacred cause with the players and gamers.
If a doubt was expressed by a poor, unsuspecting player on a forum, he
was immediately beset by the loyal legions. The feedback by the dev team
and publisher was unprecedented. They were everywhere! Taking on all
comers with a smile and a wink, answering questions about the sim and
explaining design decisions. They had good cause to be confident--Steel
Beasts is armed to the teeth with force and effect! With the
abundance of tutorials and the handy interface, it is approachable to
the causal gamer who is willing to read the manual and undergo a little
training. For the hardcore tanksimmer, there is no higher ground. We
found this sim to be as advertised, an imaginative tanksim with a fresh
eye on attention to detail and realism. Steel Beasts is what all
tanksims want to be when they grow up.